Surreal revelation that Officer Crowley and Henry Gates are both preferred participants at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of
Tolerance.

Thursday is B-Day at the White House, with President Obama expected
to share a brewski with Harvard prfoessor Henry Louis Gates and the
Cambridge police officer who arrested him, Jim Crowley.

Much has been made over the fact that friends of both Gates and
Crowley say they are the last people you'd expect to find in the middle
of such an incident. And now The Wall Street Journal's SpeakEasy blog provides some Jewish-themed evidence:

In 2007, Crowley attended a three-day program for police officers
on racial profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of
Tolerance in Los Angeles. He so impressed the staff there that he was
invited back a year later for an advanced seminar, museum officials say.

Crowley’s attendance at the Jewish civil-rights organization’s programs
hasn’t been previously reported, though it is widely known that he
taught his own course on the subject at a local police department.

Sunny Lee-Goodman, director of the “Tools for Tolerance” law
enforcement program at the Museum of Tolerance, says attendees of the
“Perspectives on Profiling” program explore the perils of racial
profiling. Using interactive exhibits at the museum, officers study
both the Holocaust and the civil-rights movement in America. Officers
also engage in soul-searching about their own prejudices.

She says of Crowley: “He stands out to me. He was one
of those people who really engaged in sessions, who really showed a
high level of understanding of the issue.”

As it turns out, according to the WSJ, Gates is also "prominently featured" at the center's law enforcement training programs:

At the center’s New York tolerance center, etched on a wall near
inspirational words from Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is
a quotation from Gates: “There is no tolerance without respect. There
is no respect without knowledge.”